The demise of an elderly Dalit man at the Lebbai Kudiyiruppu village near Panagudi in Tirunelveli district took an even more tragic turn on Tuesday, April 4, after the police and some members of the dominant Nadar caste denied his family entry to the burial ground. Family members and relatives of Sundar Raj (85), who hails from the Paraiyar community and passed away due to an illness on Tuesday, were carrying his coffin to the local burial ground allocated to Scheduled Castes when the funeral procession was intercepted. The cadre of Naam Tamilar Katchi (NTK) were also a part of the procession.
A video that has emerged on social media shows relatives of Sundar engaged in a tussle with the police after the mourners were forced to stop the funeral procession. After arguing with the police for several hours, the Dalit women were eventually able to bury Sundar’s coffin in the disputed land. This incident took place at Tamil Nadu Assembly Speaker M Appavu’s village.
According to reports, five caste Hindu men belonging to the Nadar community had allegedly illegally acquired the ground and denied burial rights to Dalits. Susila Devi, a woman from the Nadar community, had subsequently filed a petition in the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court stating that her land was “wrongfully classified” as a burial ground and allotted to the Dalit community in the village by the District Collector. The dispute is still under the purview of the bench, and the police officials who stopped the Dalit funeral procession had cited the matter being sub-judice as the reason for doing so.
In the video from the scene of conflict, people from the Dalit community were seen asking the police what the caste-Hindu people planned to do about the bodies that were already buried in the land. They were also seen telling the police that their land was wrongfully appropriated by caste Hindus and that it must be returned to them.
This is not the first time that the Dalits in the state have not been allowed to use the burial ground or denied use of the public road to carry a deceased person's body to the crematorium. In February, the Nadar community from Kaduvakurichi, which comes under Manakkarai panchayat in Thoothukudi, had denied the burial rights to Dalits and refused to allow a Dalit family to take out the funeral procession of a 72-year-old man through the main road. The Dalits were forced to access the crematorium through the paddy fields.